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Gaming Guru
The Casino Answer Man (Triple Play Video Poker)8 July 1999
The column dealt specifically with the situation of a casino that offers 9-6 Jacks or Better, paying 9-for-1 on full houses and 6-for-1 on flushes, on single-hand games, but takes those payoffs down to 6-for-1 on full houses and 5-for-1 on flushes in Triple Play Poker. To choose to play the game with the lower pay table is foolish in the extreme. Full houses and flushes occur almost five times as frequently a fours of a kind. In 9-6 Jacks or Better, we get a full house about once per 87 hands and a flush once per 91 hands, but four of a kind occurs only once per 423 hands. If we bet $5 on each hand--and that would mean $15 per play on the three-hand Triple Play games--by lowering the full house flush payoffs to 6-5, we throw away an average of $96 between quads that we'd have pocketed with a 9-6 pay table. That's money we need to keep us in the game between quads. That's true even in Double Double Bonus. A 250-coin payoff on four Kings is nice, but on the average we make more than 2,000 coins worth of bets for every time we hit quads. We'd better be hitting something else along the way. By the way, your "obvious" play of breaking up two pair to hold a pair of Kings is costing you money. Starting with a single pair, your chances of pulling four of a kind are only 1 in 360--not much better than when you started. There are 16,215 possible three-card draws, and 45 will give you four of a kind. That's vastly outweighed by the 1 in 11.75 chance of drawing a full house if you keep both pairs. Your expected average return for holding both pairs is 8.4 coins for each five played, while it's only 7.2 for holding the pair of Kings. The casino has enough of an edge already. Don't give it something extra by accepting low pay tables and making low-percentage plays while chasing jackpots. This article is provided by the Frank Scoblete Network. Melissa A. Kaplan is the network's managing editor. If you would like to use this article on your website, please contact Casino City Press, the exclusive web syndication outlet for the Frank Scoblete Network. To contact Frank, please e-mail him at fscobe@optonline.net. Related Links
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